


what we deserve

by nothingbutfic



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 20:59:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4976359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingbutfic/pseuds/nothingbutfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pyro’s always been a good lieutenant, and loyal to the cause. An AU of X-Men: The Last Stand, a snippet of what might have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what we deserve

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to D and to Jess, who keep asking for more involving this grumpy asshole.

_"You saved me."_

Magneto looked a mess, suddenly old and slack-jawed with shocked, colourless eyes. Pyro wondered for a moment if it was simply because the possibility someone else might have to save him had never entered the great old man's mind.

The killing of the guard had been instinct; cold anger burning a man away to ash, the notion that a mere human would dare to cure any of them still eating away at his gut. But it wasn't the man he cared about. Heck, he didn't even care that much about Mystique. She'd always been a sly bitch. But the way Magneto looked at her now, the finality of that whispered "You're no longer one of us" made the younger mutant look at his glorious leader as if the foundations were beginning to crumble.

He'd joined the Brotherhood to be himself, no longer caged by rules and whims and someone else's needs: Pyro had literally walked out of the Blackbird shooting from the hip about how certain other people always did what they were told. No, his purpose was too pure and grand to be constrained by a morality that was simply human.

And as Mystique shivered on the cold metal floor of the prison compartment, Pyro knew that he had a choice here, to either do what was expected of him, or to run free again.

Like a good little lieutenant, he offered to take the gun. Magneto gave it to him with no heed; of course he did. Because Pyro was docile and Pyro was trusted and Magneto knew just what buttons to press.

So Pyro calmly shot him in the chest with a dose of the cure. Then even as Magneto was collapsing, he swivelled to shoot Juggernaut, and the dude who could duplicate himself. They too fell down, twitching, and Pyro stared at the gun for a second before he stashed it in his belt, the shock really beginning to hit him as he breathed hard and got two hands under Mystique - Raven now, possibly, but always Mystique to him - and hauled her up.

"Up, up, up!" he implored, and when he got her to a sitting position, he yanked her further. Callisto poked her head through the opening up the back of the van to see what was going on, and Pyro lashed out with a jet of flame. Callisto didn't have a head after that.

But Mystique was his concern, and somehow, they staggered together, one arm over his shoulders, him clutching her tight as she managed to get her feet under her.

"Pyro..." Magneto called out, as they peered out at the threshold of the cells. There was a question implicit in his voice.

Pyro turned back for a second to look at the man he'd believed in. "Because the only person you don't sacrifice, Erik, is you," he said. "And this cause was supposed to be about more than that."

"An idealist," Erik wheezed at him, full of contempt. "You should have run home to Charles from the start."

"Fuck the pair of you." And then, holding Raven in his arms, John leapt from the van. A blur of motion in the corner of his eye, and Quill burned away without so much time as a scream. He stepped gingerly over Callisto's smouldering body, got her to one of the prison vans that wasn't so roughed up, and hauled a dead cop out of the passenger seat before laying her in it. There was a blanket in the back to keep her warm, and some cuffs from said dead cop that he put around her ankles, and another set he put around her wrists. He might have been crazy, but he wasn't stupid.

She glared at him, still recovering from the shock. "Are these really necessary?" she asked him as he put the van into gear and started driving away from the smoking wreckage. A glance in the rear view mirror was all it took to turn some of those smoking wrecks into proper fires; maybe Erik would be able to crawl away from it. Maybe.

"You might try to kill me," Pyro reasoned, focussing on just getting the hell out of dodge.

"Mutants aren't supposed to lock up other mutants."

"If you're preaching solidarity, Mystique, you wanna tell me how many times the X-Men have kicked your ass? That seems to ruin your reasoning."

"They're turncoats, with no sense of loyalty to their kind-"

Pyro took his eyes off the road to look at her. The expression in his grey eyes actually made her stop and take notice, as if the number of people he'd killed that day wasn't enough. "Everyone," he said levelly, "is a turncoat. And loyalty sucks."

They drove the rest of the way in silence.

***

He parked the van in some useless little town in the back end of New York State, and scoped out the ladies' toilets in the main park for a while until he found someone who was roughly Mystique's size. One unconscious woman left naked in a cubicle later, and they had a new car, some cash, and went three towns for Mystique to withdraw some money.

All the bank accounts she'd established from the 1960s onwards, all full of cash siphoned off from companies who experimented on mutants. "C'mon, one of them has to actually be connected to your own damn name."

She'd left papers in a safety deposit box, and was able to charm the bank manager into letting her have access. Then she could demonstrably prove she was in fact one Raven Darkholme, and had passport, bankbook, and a wad of cash to her name.

Standing on the main street, they looked at one another, both a little lost. She looked weird in human skin, lacking some of the grace she normally had; he was all hunched shoulders and blank expression.

"I should kill you," is what she told him.

Pyro shrugged. "Probably."

"Why did you do it, really?"

"If he could dump you, he could certainly dump me. How many good lieutenants has he had, anyway?"

Both Mystique and Magneto had hinted, and God knew that some of the underground villain lair hideouts and safe houses they frequented had rooms with other people's musty clothes and the odd toothbrush or two. Since joining the Brotherhood, Pyro had learned that Mystique and Magneto had a history, and while sometimes other mutants joined them on the journey, they were the two who always, always, went on. 

Except not today.

"He's had a lot." She shrugged off the admission like it was nothing. And to think he thought he was gonna be somebody. That he was gonna be special, please surrogate mommy and daddy, that he’d do anything to just to show how worthy he was.

He’d killed for the both of them. And he’d killed for himself. So maybe he was no better and no worse. "Yeah. Figured. I deserve better than that. So do you."

There was a pause. "Are you really going back there? They don’t deal well with those who live in shades of grey." Mystique knew what he would do before he did, but the moment it was uttered, Pyro felt it was the right thing to do. Even if she sounded like she’d tried something similar in another life.

Walking back, he spread his arms wide, hinting at the igniters placed around his wrists. She flinched and he kind of liked that reaction. "No, they don't. But they're good people, so they won't hurt me. And I like the idea of hanging around and making everything more complicated than they want it to be.”

She looked at him for a second more, eyes betraying nothing, before getting in the stolen car and driving away.

John caught two trains to get him to Westchester, holed up in a seat with his arms wrapped around him like any other defensive schoolkid. After sleeping at the station after the train got in around midnight, he picked up a bad cup of coffee from the station cafe in the morning and split the rest of the way between hitching a ride and walking along the damn road.

He arrived at the front gates a little before 7, and carefully clambered up the brick wall, easing his way over the barbed wire. When a security camera swivelled to track him, Pyro gave it a little wave and a tight-lipped smile before launching to grab hold of a branch and clamber down to the ground.

The back lawn was deserted. In all the windows he scanned, there was only a brief flash of a single face staring out at him, but they were gone too quickly for him to identify the person.

Up the steps, no-one to the left, no-one to the right. He paused at the bay doors, pursing his lips for a second as he stared at the little keypad. It took a second of decision before he punched in a four-digit code, and then Pyro couldn’t help but snort as the small LED lights turned green and the door clicked open with a buzz.

It was a small matter to walk down the halls, one hand drifting along the wood panels, other hand at the ready, wrist bared. Then he remembered where he was and what he was doing, and took a deep breath, before his fingers started to work at catches and buckles. He felt more than heard people gathered in classrooms, safe behind locked doors, or crouched up stairwells where he couldn’t see them. The place might look empty, but it was still a school.

Moving into one of the ground floor kitchens, he dumped his wrist igniters on the corner of the tabletop, and looked at them for a long moment before busying himself with grabbing ingredients from the refrigerator, and cooking utensils from the cupboards.

And so it was there that Bobby Drake found him, creeping around the corner with a hand curled at his side like he would frost it up at any moment.

“…What are you doing here, Allerdyce?”

He sounded hurt, still, and Pyro let himself savour a small smirk at that, but he didn’t turn around. “What does it look like I’m doing?” he wondered, oh so innocently, wooden spoon beating in a mixing bowl in slow but sure strokes, determined to scrape every bit from the edges and incorporate it properly. “I’m making pancakes.”

“I didn’t even know you could cook.”

Pyro rolled his eyes. “There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Frosty.”

He reached for a pan from a cupboard and clicked the gas on. After it ignited, he didn’t need to fiddle with the dial.

“Why are you here?” Bobby tried again.

Pyro flicked him a pitying look. The kid had always been in over his head. “Well, I just slipped Magneto and the rest of the Brotherhood the cure. You know they’re not really impressive when you get to see their true colours. Not as impressive as me, anyway.”

“You did what?”

“Keep up, Frosty, I just ended the war. Figured I should come get the praise I deserved. And if the cure ends up being temporary, well.” Pyro poured some of the pancake mix into the pan and glanced over at Bobby, grey eyes meeting blue. Fucker was still cute, that was certain. “Who else could defend me from Magneto’s wrath other than the biggest bunch of boy scouts in the world? You always did scream ‘gallant protector’, didn’t you Bobby?”

“Fuck.”

“Language.” Pyro gestured at him with the wooden spoon. “This is a _school_.”


End file.
